No time for more, because still in London, post MacAD.uk, but come join us for the 50th (!) [MacSysAdmin] Bier on Thursday, 18 February 2016, from 18:45, at Gloria, and let Michael and special guest Balz tell you all about the pub conference…

Update: By popular demand, we are meeting at 18:45 at The Butcher (Heinrichstrasse 239) for a quick bite, then at 19:45 at the gallery for the performance.

Since I’m still traveling, I’ll have to keep it short, but I did want to specifically mention Quiver, because it can import Evernote ENEX files, even those consisting of multiple notes. Yes, you’ll lose the OCR and some formatting, but at least you get to reuse your content in an open format. See also the MacStories review.

I mean look at Gmail. What is it that makes a private company think they can run an email service more cheaply, more reliably, and more securely than Google? People say, “Yeah, but that means our mail is in the cloud. We need to know where our data is?” Really? Why. For security reasons? What do you think is more secure—Google’s servers and datacenters or your office? People say, “But Google doesn’t have an SLA!” Um, yeah, that’s because they’re Google. They don’t need an SLA. When Gmail is down it’s in the news, and they have about 100x more people than you have all scrambling to fix the problem. (And many of them are the people who wrote the email product!) When your email goes down, you have Ray, your Exchange-certified sysadmin who you’ve paged several times.

As Gruber points out, the performance is impressive: “But at a fundamental level — CPU speed, GPU speed, quality of the display, quality of the sound output, and overall responsiveness of interface — the iPad Pro is a better computer than a MacBook or MacBook Air, and a worthy rival to the far more expensive MacBook Pros.” Cf. “On Apple’s Insurmountable Platform Advantage”.

We were in Göteborg and it was fantastic and you should make a note in your calendar for 4–7 October 2016 (or 6–9 September 2016—I’ve seen both, mark both, and we’ll ask Tycho) and a note for December, when, during your yearly review, you’ll tell your boss to put it in the budget.

For those who had to stay home here’s the Documentation. Ask Balz or Birgit or Max or Michael or Jean-Claude or Sebastian for their highlights. Or any of the other 240 attendees.

In early August I visited Bret Victor’s Communications Design Group research laboratory in San Francisco. Against the far wall of the lab’s library stood a 10-foot wooden bookshelf. It was stuffed with manuals on the history of computers and programming and interfaces, novels and countless non-fiction books.

From behind me, Bret said: ‘Watch this,’ and pointed a small green laser at one of the books. The spine – the physical spine – lit up and above the bookshelf the book itself exploded onto an empty swath of wall. The entirety of its contents, laid out page by page by some hidden projector. The laser tracked by some hidden constellation of cameras. In his hand, Bret held an iPad, and as he pointed the laser at various projected pages they appeared on his device. As he slid from page to page on the iPad, the corresponding pages on the wall enlarged. It was a way to view both the macro and micro of a book – the overarching structure of the whole and the minutiae of the paragraph.

I want this.

And then El Capitan (or, apparently, El Capitán) was released, though it was hard to get in Göteborg. I’m also not sure how I feel about an OS X release without John Siracusa’s review…

I really enjoyed watching Spolsky’s You Suck at Excel, in which, he says, “I try to teach my team a bare minimum of non-incompetence at spreadsheets”; including notes in Trello.—But maybe the deck chair and the sea’s surf and the cool bottle of Fiano di Avellino enhanced my enthusiasm…

Two more beers (right…), then we’re off to Göteborg and MacSysAdmin 2015, including the traditional Monday dinner at (doubly Michelin-starred) Magnus & Magnus and Max is dealing with the BORDSFÖRFRÅGAN.

Another fabulous talk by Maciej Cegłowski:Web Design – The First 100 Years:The technology was pointing in one direction, the future was clear and inevitable. And then it never happened. Why? … Boeing was genuinely surprised that people cared about this stuff. What does it matter if the sun is coming through your shattered window and burning your skin, if you can have a supersonic airliner?